Nuernberg A ltstadt*
June
1945
JAMES STERN
M osT
OF
THE
LONG
golden evenings in Niirnberg I spent alone. I'd
set out in a jeep from the Luisenstrasse to the Old Town, drawn there
partly by a morbid fascination, partly because of the feeling that if you
live for weeks, surrounded by destruction (knowing you're not, thank
God, going to stay there much longer) , you may as well familiarize
yourself with some of the worst conditions under which the native people
exist. I was aware, too, that one constantly recurring question still re–
mained unanswered:
If
only some 20,000 Niirnbergers had been killed
and seriously injured by air-raids, and half of the 400,000 inhabitants
had dispersed into the surrounding country, where were the remaining
200,000-or even 150,000-now living?
If
the ancient bridges over the Pegnitz had been destroyed, it would
have been almost impossible, even on foot, to move about in the Old
Town. But for some inexplicable reason they still stood. So did the green
pencil-pointed steeples of the Lorenz-Kirche-two of the astonishing
number of German Gothic Towers to survive where nothing else had.
And in Niirnberg's Altstadt nothing else had. Which is not strictly true.
For, as usual-and again no one knows why-a few statues remained.
Surrounded by deep craters full of twisted, broken drain-pipes, Albrecht
D iirer stood high up, erect (despite a black wound under one eye), like
a lonely Saint in his robes of stone. He could not be reached by jeep.
You had to climb the tiny foot-trodden paths over bricks and boulders,
past a trench, at the bottom of which lay some stinking stagnant water.
And there, every evening, under the paint-brushes in the master's out–
stretched hand, gathered a group of gangsters whose ages ranged from
four to eight. They were clothed in rags-or rather, from head to foot
they were perfectly camouflaged in filth, so that until they moved you
couldn't tell they were there. At sight of you, they scattered in different
directions, soundless on their cracked dusty feet, like rabbits over an old
warren. They simply disappeared, behind and beneath debris, into holes.
If
you remained long enough in the same place, they'd emerge again,
slowly, like rabbits, sniff the air and stare. And then you'd see that they
carried stones or sticks or bars of iron, that their teeth were black and
broken, or that they had no teeth, that one had a single arm, another
*
This is a chapter from a forthcoming book,
The Hidden Damage,
to be
published this year by Harcourt Brace.
